THE FIRST FESTIVE FIFTY! (AND ALSO THE TWENTY-FIFTH)

First drafts of history are never neat.

Take for example the first John Peel Festive Fifty. (Where listeners chose their favourite numbers.) Though ending the auspicious year of ’76, it contains not one single Punk track. Rather than ’Anarchy in the UK’ topping the list, its ’Stairway To Heaven’. It’s like one of those alt futures where we never escaped the servitude of the Roman Empire, except instead it’s listening to the guitar solo from ’Free Bird’. 

Peel himself seemed less than impressed. The following year he decided he was picking all the tracks himself.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, listeners took the all-time request seriously. So the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Dylan and Hendrix all show up. (Tho’ nothing from before the Sixties.) And even when it does go Prog, the more bloated excesses (Rush, ELP) are happily absent. Yes creep in at No. 50 with ’And You And I’, probably one of their least proggy moments. (King Crimson may be the most curious absence.) For me, it was the more the AOR and classic rock stuff which was the obstacle. Jackson Browne and Poco were soon skipped.

But overall, as a snapshot of music up to ’76, it actually makes for a pretty good playlist. Sure its strange hearing ’No Woman No Cry’ segue into ’Supper’s Ready’. But not in a bad way.

Okay, British Punk was only just getting going at this point. The Pistols (for example) had released one single, ’Anarchy in the UK’. If it could conceivably have headered the list, there was no possibility of Punk packing it. But perhaps more conspicuous by their absence are the two biggest influences on British Punk.

You know the story of how, prior to forming the Buzzcocks, Shelley and Devoto took a trip to London to see the Pistols without having heard them? Because they played Stooges songs? And yet, you guessed it, no Stooges here. In fact American Punk appears only once, with Jonathan Richman’s ’Roadrunner’. 

And mid-Sixties Powerpop, that shows up not at all. (‘My Generation’ made the 1979 and 1980 lists, but nothing in ’76.) Those lies John Lydon liked to tell, about British Punk supposedly having no influences (despite playing Stooges songs)… it looks like, at the time, people swallowed them wholesale.

As you might expect, subsequent years saw a slow decline in votes for ’Stairway to Heaven’ and a growth in Punk and Post-Punk. 1982 saw both an all-time and a year-only list, everything went year-only from then on.

Then, as a one-off for the momentous year of 2000, the all-time list was brought back. And it looks back as far as the original, some tracks make it from the early Nineties - roughly the same time lag.

But this time out its much more Eurocentric; almost half of ’76 had been American, this time precisely five Yanks make the cut. Despite many American acts not just being played but getting sessions on the show. And that with the simultaneous disappearance of Prog, which had always been a highly Europeanscene.

Remarkably, a mere three tracks from ’76 reappear, with two falling down the list. Take Hendrix’s ’All Along the Watchtower’, once no. 5, now to be found at no. 37. Dylan’s ’Visons Of Johanna’ fares similarly. Only Beefheart’s ’Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ moves up. And the early Seventies disappears almost entirely. (The Beefheart track is from ’72, but he was more a Sixties artist.)

But perhaps more significantly, a number of older tracks which could have been on the ’76 list suddenly show up. Tim Buckley’s ’Song To The Siren’ can perhaps be explained by This Mortal Coil’s cover, scoring much higher. But the Velvet Underground and Nick Drake? While the Beatles, who had been represented by three tracks, now switch to a new entry - ’I Am The Walrus’. (Still, surprisingly, no Stooges.)

Of course, you never hear music from the past directly. It cannot do other than come through the filter of the present. Perhaps, had there been another Festive Fifty two or three years earlier than ‘76, ’Tarkus’ and ’Tales From Topographic Oceans’ would have proudly reared their gatefold heads. Perhaps ’Kashmir’ and ’Supper’s Ready’ did suddenly sound bad in the context of the late Seventies, only to reach today and get good all over again.

But more, some songs go up like a firework and leaves a stain in the sky, while others have a slow-burning fuse. It takes a while for people to catch on to them.

Slightly bizarrely, this even takes in the world’s best-selling band. ’Walrus’ was one of the most radical-sounding Beatles songs. (Alongside ’Tomorrow Never Knows’, which stays inexplicably absent.)

Stories about the Velvets being shunned in their day get a little mythologised. In their time, their sound got slowly less extreme and their audience correspondingly increased. Plus their resurgence happened sooner than this might imply. Post-Punk openly owed them a debt, and by the time I was getting into music (early Eighties) they were already on the must-hear list. Had the all-time lists continued past ’82, I’d guessed they’d have shown up pretty soon.

Curiously, it was the much sweeter-sounding Folk-hued Nick Drake who took the slower lane. A press release from his own label proudly announced his new release wouldn’t be shifting any units either, but they were putting it out anyway because they liked it. After playing the track, Peel speculated about how Drake might feel about the change in response to his music.

Given which, supposing another all-time list could somehow be compiled now? Another quarter-century down the road?

Certainly, some things seem to take longer still to take. Krautrock’s era was roughly ’68 to ’75. But, despite being so big an influence on Post-Punk, it shows up not once. That would doubtless be different now. Maybe even… finally… the Stooges.

The premise of Peel’s show was the present. All-time lists stand out because they were a slightly counter-intuitive thing to do. Today, music seems to have gone the other way, with the past raked over at the expense of the present. There can be little left now that needs digging up, but still the slew of re-releases. So I’d expect a lot more leaning into the past and - most of all - much less of a difference in sound between bands of then and now.

WHAT IS ABSURDISM?

“They had it in for us, didn't they? Right from the beginning. Who'd have thought that we were so important..?”
“To be told so little – to such an end – and still, finally, to be denied an explanation...”
“In our experience, most things end in death.”
- 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead’, Tom Stoppard

It’s something of an absurd question, of course. Absurdism, surely that needs to stay indefinable by definition. We can say it overlaps greatly with Dadaism. But they're not identical.

Dadaism inclined heavily to the political, to shock tactics launched against bourgeois society. Its schtick is to exist permanently in the interchange between nihilism and insurrection, never quite siding with either. While Absurdism is more existential, more likely to reflect a general modern or even human condition. Dadaism is volatile, a corrosive that will try to burn its way out of any container it's put in. Absurdism is weighty. Not in the sense of great literary worth, in the sense of rocks in your backpack. 

Absurdism is best seen through the collision term 'passive protagonist'. The term protagonist has a double meaning – the central character, and the advocate or champion. Normally this doesn't trouble us too much, as the two travel so comfortably together. You could pretty much substitute 'hero' for 'protagonist' most of the time, without spannering any of the works.

But the hero brings meaning to his world, his actions ensure good will prevail and all the rest of it. While the Absurdist protagonist looks hopefully for meaning already existent in the world, and comes up confounded. In fact the two probably grew up together, as conjoined twins, each a reaction to the other, at least if the emblematic hero is taken as the purest form of the heroic type.

But… mirror, mirror on the wall… the awkward yet inescapable truth is that we live our lives more as Absurdist protagonists than heroes, we are more Josef K than Flash Gordon.

In Absurdism the protagonist is like a child on their first day in school, like a dreamer in a dream state. Mark Fisher summed it up: “This world was made for me, yet I have no place in it.” The adult often chooses to remember the child state indulgently, as a form of escapism, a break from responsibilities, filled with curious wonder at the beguiling world. But children often feel an all-thumbs frustration with what surrounds them. While it can have its effect on you, you are unable to work any traction upon it. Even objects do not seem obedient to you, while they seem so acquiescent in adult hands. You live in a world that makes no sense to you. And that is its power over you.

And so Absurdism’s passive protagonists are very often children or dreamers. In the case of both Carrol’s Alice and McCay’s Little Nemo they're both. Yet they don't need to be. Josef K from Kafka's ’The Trial’, is perhaps the ultimate passive protagonist. Nobody bothers explaining the rules to him, like the child in a particularly badly run custody case, and he can only surrender to the course of events.

In this way, though they may overlap philosophically, the Existential novels of Sartre and Camus are not Absurd. They take place in ‘real’ words, not just places we have heard of but which conform to recognisable rules. Absurdist works are always ‘unreal’, the most basic facts uncertain, and for that reason bleaker. Existential protagonists may discover agency, usually with great difficulty and at huge cost, but the task is not impossible. In Absurdism, reason is not just absent. The universe actively defies it, and works to repel it should you dare to try to wield it. The laws of physics themselves may decide to turn on you.

If there is an uncertainty to Absurdism, it lies in the humour. Because many Absurdist writers were held to be important, they were taken in deadly earnest by critics. Yet there's accounts of Kafka reading his works aloud to his friends, and all falling into convulsions of laughter. But it's not just that the humour is black. It's that even when you find laughter irresistible, you're never quite sure that's the right response. Is it just a defence mechanism on your part? It's like the adage about a laugh being a scream played at a different speed.

So if Absurdism has to contain humour, does humour have to contain Absurdism? Perhaps ‘have’ is too strong a term, but its common. As Priestley said: “Good clowns never try to be funny, they are eager, hopeful creatures, lost in a hostile world, and with great clowns the very furniture is menacing, never to be trusted.”

A friend, a huge fan of Laurel and Hardy, once told me that as a child he’d found them unbearable to watch. The way events constantly thwarted their plans seemed too much like real life. Which is perhaps why comedies can have ‘bad’ protagonists (Wile E Coyote, Dick Dastardly, Black Adder) whose perpetually failing schemes are dampened from invoking our sympathy.

But nothing can entirely remove the central dilemma. Absurdist fiction can appear like some sort of homeopathic remedy, by recognising the absurdity of the situation in a work of fiction we emerge better prepared to engage the absurdity in our lives. But does this work? Do we make Josef K our whipping boy to console ourselves that we would not become as weighted down as him, that we would fare better if given the role of protagonist?